The Complete Henry Bech
10 best books like The Complete Henry Bech (John Updike): Naguib Mahfouz: Three Novels of Ancient Egypt, Sanditon and Other Stories, Auden: Poems, Shirley & The Professor, Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology, The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower, Ethan Frome, Summer, Bunner Sisters, Symposium / Phaedrus
| Author | Naguib Mahfouz |
| ISBN | 1841593052 |
Mahfouz reaches back thousands of years to bring us tales from his homeland's majestic early history—tales of the Egyptian nobility and of war, star-crossed love, and the divine rule of the pharoahs. In Khufu's Wisdom, the legendary Fourth Dynasty monarch faces the prospect of the end of his rule...
| Author | Jane Austen |
| ISBN | 0679447199 |
Readers of Jane Austen’s six great novels are left hungering for more, and more there is: the marvelous unpublished manuscripts she left behind, collected here.
Sanditon might have been Austen’s greatest novel had she lived to finish it. Its subject matter astonishes: here is Austen...
| Author | W.H. Auden |
| ISBN | 0679443673 |
The Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Auden is just another reminder of his exhilarating lyric power and his understanding of love and longing in all their sacred and profane guises. One...
| Author | Charlotte Brontë |
| ISBN | 0307268217 |
Shirley is the story of a complicated friendship between two very different women: shy and socially constrained Caroline, the poor niece of a tyrannical clergyman; and the independent heiress Shirley, who has both the resources and the spirit to defy convention. The romantic entanglements of the...
| Author | Oscar Wilde |
| ISBN | 1857150422 |
Brilliant and tragic, decadent yet radical, a socialist dandy and a witty moralist, Oscar Wilde embodied all the contradictions of the 1890s. The scope of his genius is indicated in this volume by the inclusion of the period’s most scintillating comedy – The Importance of Being Earnest; its most...
| Author | H.G. Wells |
| ISBN | 0307593843 |
Gathered together in one hardcover volume: three timeless novels from the founding father of science fiction.
The first great novel to imagine time travel, The Time Machine (1895) follows its scientist narrator on an incredible journey that takes him finally to Earth’s last moments—and...
| Author | P.G. Wodehouse |
| ISBN | 0307266613 |
P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) was perhaps the most widely acclaimed British humorist of the twentieth century. Throughout his career, he brilliantly examined the complex and idiosyncratic nature of English upper-crust society with hilarious insight and wit. The works in this volume...
| Author | Penelope Fitzgerald |
| ISBN | 1857152476 |
Penelope Fitzgerald, who died in 2000, emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable English writers of the last century. The three novels in this volume all display her characteristic wit, intellectual breadth and narrative brilliance, applied to the different traditional forms into which...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) These three brilliantly wrought, tragic novellas explore the repressed emotions and destructive passions of working-class people far removed from the social milieu usually inhabited by Edith Wharton's characters. Ethan Frome is one of Wharton's most famous...
| Author | Plato |
| ISBN | 0486277984 |
On the Symposium:
First things first, the reason I found this translation so smooth and entertaining is the language, this is by far the easiest English book I've read.
In the Symposium, Agathon holds a supper with his friends (writers and philosophers) and they all decide to make their devotions...
| Author | Tacitus |
| ISBN | 0812966996 |
Cornelius Tacitus brilliantly chronicles the moral decline and rampant civil unrest in the Roman Empire in a period when the earliest foundations of modern Europe were being laid. The Annals commence in a.d. 14, at the death of Augustus, recounting the reigns of Tiberius, Gaius (Caligula), Claudius,...
Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher
| Author | R.K. Narayan |
| ISBN | 1400044766 |
R. K. Narayan (1906—2001) witnessed nearly a century of change in his native India and captured it in fiction of uncommon warmth and vibrancy. The four novels collected here, all written during British rule, bring colonial India into intimate focus through the narrative gifts of this...
| Author | Diana Secker Tesdell |
| ISBN | 0307594947 |
As Scheherezade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence of the storyteller’s art, with its ancient roots in fantastical legends and tales told around a fire.
In Bedtime Stories, great writers of the past two centuries...
| Author | Raymond Chandler |
| ISBN | 0375415025 |
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Creator of the famous Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler elevated the American hard-boiled detective genre to an art form. Chandler’s last four novels, published here in one volume, offer ample opportunity to savor the unique and utterly compelling fictional...
| Author | Irène Némirovsky |
| ISBN | 0307267083 |
Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irène Némirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite Française. But Suite Française was only the coda to the brief yet remarkably prolific career of this nearly forgotten, magnificent novelist. Here in one volume are...
| Author | John Steinbeck |
| ISBN | 1883011019 |
John Steinbeck, from the very start of his career, evoked the landscape and people of central California with lyrical intensity and unflinching frankness. The Library of America presents for the first time in one volume Steinbeck’s early writings, which expressed his abiding concerns for community,...
The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays
| Author | Albert Camus |
| ISBN | 1400042550 |
From one of the most brilliant and influential thinkers of the twentieth century–two novels, six short stories, and a pair of essays in a single volume. In both his essays and his fiction, Albert Camus (1913—1960) de-ployed his lyric eloquence in defense against despair, providing an affirmation...
| Author | Elisa Albert |
| ISBN | 0743291271 |
Elisa Albert's debut story collection marks the arrival of an extraordinary new voice in fiction. In "How This Night Is Different," Albert boldly illuminates the struggles of young, disaffected Jews to find spiritual fulfillment. With wit and wisdom, she confronts themes -- self-deprecation,...
The tale of compulsive hoarders Homer and Langley Collyer so shocked 1940s Manhattan that the brothers and their Harlem brownstone live on today as one of the most notable American case studies of acute disposophobia. With a nervous energy and obsession to match his protagonists, Matt Bell’s prose...
| Author | Rudyard Kipling |
| ISBN | 0679435921 |
As a young writer living in Lahore during the time of the British Raj, Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was possessed by an enormous subject—India—and his genius for rendering its beauty and strangeness was even then so fully formed that we have to look to the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens to...
| Author | Ellen Litman |
| ISBN | 0393065111 |
Big Thanks to Dov Zeller for turning me on to author Ellen Litman.
I enjoyed Litman’s sassy, stylistic, scintillating prose. She adds freshness to the term comic-tragedy. I thought the stories were mostly hilarious and truthful.
I saw a few very negative 1-star reviews and I couldn’t...
| Author | Amos Oz |
| ISBN | 0151960380 |
Amos Oz's first book —beautifully repackaged— is a disturbing and moving collection of short stories about kibbutz life.
Each of the eight stories in this volume grips the reader from the first line. Each conveys the tension and intensity of feeling in the founding period of Israel, a...
